


Requiem for a Show I Loved: The End of X-Files' Season Seven

by PlaidAdder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Critique, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, season seven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-16
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-13 10:32:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2147391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pity the man who only ever had that one really good idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Requiem for a Show I Loved: The End of X-Files' Season Seven

 

 

Pity the man who only ever had that one really  _good_  idea.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the poor bastard, stays up nights over his historical romances, his horror stories, his Lost World novels, thinking  _this is the best thing I’ve ever done,_  and the publishers keep bringing the books out because anything with his name on it will indeed sell but every day he just gets more letters saying  _bring back Sherlock Holmes_. After a few years he throws them kind of a fanfic—a case from the archives, he’s not  _back,_ people, he’s nostalgia now, that’s all he’ll ever be—but that only makes it worse. Ten years Doyle tries to bury Holmes; but it’s not up to him any more, the public have turned him into something Doyle could never have imagined. One night he says,  _all right then, fuck it. Fuck him. Fuck you all._ And Holmes is back. The fans are ecstatic. At first.

Because it’s not the same. Doyle doesn’t love Holmes any more. He can’t make him breathe, he can’t make him grow. Holmes just keeps doing the same things he always did, only broader and cruder. He’s stuck in the same plots, too, the same loop only with different characters and a different crime. Holmes doesn’t know why he’s slipping. He keeps winning. He keeps solving the cases. But it’s not the same. He’s losing Watson, even. Watson, who was always so game for the adventure, and now he’s just getting slower, and more stupid, and understands less, and finally he moves out, and gets married, and one day Holmes is crouching on a beach looking at of all things a killer jellyfish and for some reason he keeps thinking the words  _you should have let me die._

Gene Roddenberry too, all those ideas for what to do after  _Star Trek_  and one day he just had to face it: there is no “after  _Star Trek.”_ When Roddenberry tries pitching his new ideas, it never works for long. The sex stuff is too creepy, even for television network executives in the 1970s. The allegories are so cheesy they basically aren't making sense any more. _Star Trek_ turned into something more than the sum of his parts; none of the other ideas have. It has the fans, it has the money, it will bury us all. You better just keep making more  _Star Trek,_ he tells himself, because nothing else is ever gonna sell.

And along comes Chris Carter. Nobody expected  _The X-Files_ to define the nineties. It shouldn’t have taken off like this. Nobody at Fox could understand it. A man with the feelings of a woman and a woman with the brains of a man. Detectives who don’t solve their cases, mysteries that are left mysterious, an unknown actress the suits never liked the looks of and a lead actor who for a solid year couldn’t be trusted to come up with a believable line delivery, all of them running around in the mist up in the Canadian forests at night, all those batteries in all those flashlights. Who knew you could make a hit show entirely out of paranoia, claustrophobia, and fear of the dark? It made no sense that something that made no sense—not common sense, not the kind of sense the network ever understood—could become the new reality. It’s a miracle, he thought, I’m a miracle worker, everything I touch comes to life and turns to gold. I’ll make them all real, the visions in my head, the Apocalyptic mutterings of serial killers, the dreams of these new machines, they’ll watch anything I make, even the fucking Lone Gunmen. 

But they won’t.  _Millennium_ dies.  _Harsh Realm_ dies.  _The Lone Gunmen_ hardly even gets born before it dies. They all keep dying, all except  _The X-Files._ Nobody’s ever going to get enough of that. But he’s tired of it now, he’s so tired, and he can’t even understand why they keep coming back. He’s tried to end it, he keeps trying, but they keep telling him the ratings are strong enough, I think we can go another season. Well they can, maybe, but what about him? He doesn’t love this show any more, he doesn’t love the characters, when he sits down to write them now he’s just angry. He wants to beat the crap out of them, and he even writes a script where he does; but it doesn’t help, the studio says they’ll renew him for another year and what can he do? All his other brainchildren are dead.

Mulder can move on, though. He can. He’s been resolving his issues one by one. He’s free. He said that himself. _Let him move on, at least, the poor bastard_ , he thinks,  _even if I can’t._ Duchovny wants out anyway. He's wanted out for years now. Well let him out. Let him find out just how much it sucks when the public only ever wants one thing from you that you're already sick of.

But don't let him go too far. Because. Because he can’t shake the fear that Mulder's all they’ll ever want. That they won’t be able to love anyone else now. Even though Carter, himself, doesn’t love Mulder any more.

Abduction, he thinks. We did it with Scully and it was magic. Made the show so much stronger, so much better, made it matter so much more. Maybe if I send Mulder into space for a while, absence will make the heart grow fonder. Maybe, after a while, I can fall in love with him again.

Maybe.

He sits there staring at the computer screen. Long ago they made him read Samuel Beckett in school but he never understood it until right now. The desire to end and the fear to do it; this forced march forward through a life without pleasure or desire because nobody knows what the alternative might be. Finished, it’s nearly finished; but he hesitates to end. He hesitates. It can’t go on. He can’t go on.

He takes a deep breath. His fingers hover over the keyboard.

He types the words, “I’m pregnant.”

He goes on.


End file.
